The disclosure relates to the field of polymer waveguides and, more particularly, to polymer waveguides having reduced propagation loss.
Polymer waveguides are an alternative to glass fibers for use in optical high performance data communication applications such as in supercomputers and datacenters. Polymer waveguides can be manufactured with known technologies, such as the so-called “planar technologies”, on the panel level, possibly functionalized to include splitters, combiners, coupling elements, etc. They can support higher optical interconnect densities on the board level. Their cost is expected to become lower than that of glass fibers.
One of the main drawbacks of polymer waveguides is their propagation loss, which typically is on the order of 2-5 dB per meter, whereby typical link-lengths are limited to 1 meter or less. In comparison, typical loss values for multimode glass fibers are in the range of 0.0035 dB per meter.
It can be realized that the two main origins for the losses are: (1) induced by the manufacturing process (e.g., surface roughness, geometrical tolerances and contamination); and (2) due to the intrinsic loss of the polymers employed (e.g., different molecular and bond resonances).